Jorge Luis Borges

[Stewart]

There's so much that can be said about Jorge Luis Borges (born 24 August 1899, died 14 June 1986) that it would be pointless posting a brief biography of him here (if you need one, his Wikipedia article should suffice).

Essayist, poet, critic, translator, writer - he was all of these. And it would appear that, looking at his bibliography, we are denied much of his work in the English language.

A quick summary of his fiction:

Many of his most popular stories concern the nature of time, infinity, mirrors, labyrinths, reality, philosophy, and identity. A number of stories focus on fantastic themes, such as a library containing every possible 410-page text ("The Library of Babel"), a man who forgets nothing he experiences ("Funes, the Memorious"), an artifact through which the user can see everything in the universe ("The Aleph"), and a year of time standing still, given to a man standing before a firing squad ("The Secret Miracle"). The same Borges told more and less realistic stories of South American life, stories of folk heroes, streetfighters, soldiers, gauchos, detectives, historical figures. He mixed the real and the fantastic: fact with fiction. On several occasions, especially early in his career, these mixtures sometimes crossed the line into the realm of hoax or literary forgery.

It seems from accounts that pretty much everyone (known and unknown) read for him at one point. And he lives on today through his work, but also through the work of others, notably as thinly disguised characters in Umberto Eco's The Name Of The Rose and Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves.

Personally, while I find him fascinating - or, perhaps, more his ideas than the man himself - I just haven't read enough of his work.

RELATED THREADS

• With Borges, Alberto Manguel

RELATED LINKS

• The Garden Of Forking Paths
• Borges Center (Iowa)
• InternetAleph
• The Borgesian Cyclopedia

[Eric]

I read the Penguin collection of his stories "Labyrinths" about thirty years ago, and have liked his stories ever since. Not that I've read them much recently, but I have happy memories of the sheer weirdness of his train of thought in some of the stories.

One of them posits the idea of rewriting Cervantes' "Don Quixote" by going through all the experiences of the author so that the book will be recreated identical to the way it is now, not by plagiarism or copying, but by allowing the experiences to channel the life of the new writer into the same paths as those followed by Cervantes.

Another story "The Secret Miracle" tells again of re-creation, this time the fulfillment of some unfulfilled wish that I don't remember, during the split second between the bullet killing a man being executed leaves the gun and the instant it kills him.

The stories all have this kind of strange intellectual underpinning, with perception, memory and the recording of literature playing important roles.
And so on.

As with Bruno Schulz, quite a diffferent short-story writer, once I'd read some Borges stories, I decided he was my kind of writer. It would be interesting to re-read them now and see if I still feel the same way about them.

[Heteronym]

I happily own Jorge Luis Borges' completed works in four hefty volumes, plus two volumes collecting his works in collaboration with other writers (amongst them Adolfo Bioy Casares), plus two volumes with the transcripted radio conversations he had with Osvaldo Ferrari in his final years. He was the first writer I decided to follow with ardent admiration.

Although in the beginning I south him for his fascinating short-stories (I prefer the early ones, "The Library of Babel, The Garden of Forking Paths, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius; Funes, the Memorious", anything included in Fictions), I now reread him mostly for his wonderful non-fiction: prologues, essays and articles, all of them small love letters to writers and books. To me Borge turned into an art loving literature. No one else has writen with so much passion, wit, clarity and erudition about the topic that dominated his life.

Of his poetry, I confess I never cared for very much, although he considered it better than his short fiction. And when he became blind he favored it since its regular form allowed him to better memorise it. For the prose he wrote before his seminal short-story collection I have very little love too, since it doesn't seem like Borges yet. I wouldn't find my initial enthusiasm again until The Book of Sand, his second best collection of fiction to me.

Having reread Fictions recently, I returned from it with fonder memories of short-stories like "Pierre Menard" and "Herbert Quain"; his fantasy enthralled me, but now I find myself loving these simpler pieces, funnier for book lovers, of fictional writers who rewrite Don Quixote and wrote excellent detective fiction; one of my regrets is never being able to read Quain's "The God of the Labyrinth" one day...

People often describe Borges as a writer's writer; I can't conceive a graver injustice against him. Borges was first and foremost a reader's writer, an author who delighted in the 19th century maxim of writing for the pleasure of the reader; in particular, he liked writing for people who loved books. His erudition was never impenetrable, his intellectual games were never alienating experiments.

Of Borges, the best I can say is that, more than writing great stories for my entertainment, he introduced me to dozens of new writers and hundreds of new books that will keep me enthralled for decades to come. I think that's the best a writer can hope to achieve.

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Heteronym

People often describe Borges as a writer's writer; I can't conceive a graver injustice against him. Borges was first and foremost a reader's writer, an author who delighted in the 19th century maxim of writing for the pleasure of the reader; in particular, he liked writing for people who loved books.

From that Alberto Manguel memoir I read, he seemed to think, first and foremost, Borges was a writer's reader. Then a writer himself.

[Heteronym]

I'm sure Borges would have agreed with that.

[GERBAM]

"A READER'S WRITER' I like that.

I read LABYRINTHS in college a stone ago and have never forgot the impact his stories had on me. I had never read anything like them and while I found them confounding they were also thought provoking and somehow "dangerous" or "wicked". The kind of thing one wanted to read under the covers with a flashlight.

When I learned that he was blind much of what he wrote became clearer to me. His life was one of the intellect and he willingly shared his ideas and opinions freely with his public. We are better for having read him.

[Heteronym]

Oh but Borges' myopia was progressive and up until Labyrinths he had some eye-sight. I think he only lost it completely by the '50s. I think he wrote what he wrote because he couldn't write any other way. From his childhood readings one can see he was naturally fascinated with labyrinths, dreams, history, the occult, theology, philosophy, books, detective fiction, all the leitmotifs that crop in his work. I believe he would have written what he wrote had he kept his eye-sight.

[Kingbee]

In my view, he was the greatest writer of all time. The fact that this man was pretty much a polymath but still managed to make his work incredibly accessible to all (which I think is a problem with Saramago!) is a testimony to his genius. His short stories are like no other. My favourites have to be in Ficciones- The Circular Ruins, The Lottery of Babel, and The Secret Miracle.

I also have his speeches on language, and his collection of non-fictions (or should that be non-Ficciones?), which explore everything from angels to blindness, from early reviews of Finnegans Wake to ponderings on the Nazi occupation of Europe. Sheer brilliance, in my opinion, but his short stories are what do it for me!

[Eric]

I know what you're getting at Kingbee, but maybe you're overstating your case a bit. "The greatest writer of all time" implies a ranking or hierarchy where every book ever written is assessed and put on a scale. Who can read all the world's books in all the world's languages and still have energy left over to choose?

But I agree with most of you here that his mixture of erudition and genius makes Borges a very readable, yet clever, writer. His stories are indeed some of my favourites.

[Kingbee]

Ok, maybe I should state: "out of all the writers I have read so far, I think he is the greatest".

But I see what you mean- literature should not have a hierarchy anyway. But out of all the writers I have read, he is the one who never ceases to amaze me time and time again, who I can always go back to.

"Who can read all the world's books in all the world's languages and still have energy left over to choose?"

This is perhaps something that draws parallels with The Library of Babel!

[Heteronym]

Originally Posted by Eric

IWho can read all the world's books in all the world's languages and still have energy left over to choose?

Borges can! How do you think he's spending his time in Infinity?


The difference between Saramago and Borges is rather simple: the former is a post-modernist in thought and execution; the latter was a post-modernist in thought, but a classicist in execution. The former has the 20th century belief that if people don't read his books, it's OK; the latter wrote for the delight of the reader, and the writers he celebrated wrote for the delight of the reader.

Borges had one of the clearest, most concise styles of any modern writer I've read.

I love his non-fiction too. He's written some of my favorite literary criticism, with a passion and clear erudition that critics can't match. His thoughts on Kafka, Hawthorne, Coleridge, Keats, Chesterton, Swedenborg have awakened in me a curiosity for all of them. At times I've found enjoying his non-fiction more than his short-stories.

His book reviews were always brilliant. Of Finnegans Wake I love how he admits he doesn't understand what's going so he's just going to public wait (while its defenders secretly wait) for Stuart Gilbert's manual. And then he says that Lewis Carroll did it all better in the 'Alice' books.

[Stewart]

An essay from the Quarterly Conversation by Marcelo Ballvé about Macedonio Fernández: The Man Who Invented Borges.

[Cavalier Bizarre]

Jorge Luis Borges was--or, in our circular time and perpetual archetypes, will forever be--an immaculate writer, as long as readers keep inventing his words, which he himself noted in various essays, specifically so in the last line of his poem La Dicha, aka Joy (YouTube - John Berger reads Joy by Jorge Luis Borges).

He wrote some of my favorite short stories, the medium he favored and, in my opinion, excelled at the most. I think his best body of work was from 1944 to 1949, with the collections The Garden of Forking Paths, Artifices, and The Aleph. The Book of Sand is fantastic as well and demonstrates Borges' further concision of his short prose style, and the supreme minimalism that he had grown to favor late in his writing career; but, as I said, I find myself preferring the intricate, yet thicker sophistication of the earlier collections. He toys with philosophy and narrative masterfully.

At the top of the list would have to be:

The Garden of Forking Paths
Death and the Compass
Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth
The Circular Ruins
Funes the Memorious
The Library of Babel
The Secret Miracle

His criticisms and reviews were incisive and surgically precise. Similarly was the concise style Heteronym speaks of that he developed with an intense rigor directed towards his idea of an ideal aesthetic, which I'm currently reading about in The Narrow Act by Ronald Christ, a literary criticism praised by Borges himself as a "remarkable piece of readable and meaningful scholarship."

There are many gems amongst his poetry, but I find a fair bit of it redundant in theme and language, and overly excessive in allusion--a technique Borges used to achieve an "atemporal art," or to make the reader recognize the repetition of history and timeless nature--whereas his short fiction used it as a supportive basis for his craft, rather than foundational, which I prefer.

I have a few of his books and recently bought a Franklin Library edition of Ficciones, beautifully leather-bound and ornamented in gilt.

Discovering his fiction definitely brought me further and more enthusiastically into the world of literature. I can't recommend him enough.

[Sevigne]

I am that oddity that prefers Mr. Borges' non-fiction to his fiction. Not but what I enjoy the fiction but I am made breathless by my admiration for the essays.

[liehtzu]

Borges was certainly a well-read chap, and I wonder if the ending of "The Circular Ruins" ("With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he was also an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him") wasn't a tip of the hat to the Chuang Tzu, the classic Taoist text ("Yet fools think they are awake; they know just what they are, princes, herdsmen, so obstinately sure of themselves! Confucius and you are both dreams, and I who call you a dream am also a dream").

I've been re-reading the Ficciones recently and find myself appreciating them more than when I'd last read them (nearly ten years ago) and thought them rather dry intellectual exercises. Some of them still leave me cold, but the best ones certainly get me dancing round the room.

[Mirabell]

Interview with Borges translator Suzanne Jill Levine

Suzanne Jill Levine is a noted translator of creative, innovative, adventurous Latin American Fiction from authors like Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy, and Manuel Puig. She’s also a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the general editor and co-translator of Penguin Classics’ five new volumes of nonfiction and poetry from widely respected Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges: On Writing, On Mysticism, On Argentina, The Sonnets, and Poems of the Night. Her own book The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction has been recently reissued by Dalkey Archive.

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